Disorganized Being, Fractured Will

The intimately dependent relationship between being and will is most evident in our variable ability to pay attention to anything other than well-crafted entertainment targeted at our particular interests. Our will to focus depends on having sufficient energy of the right quality available. You may start something with great interest, but find that your contact with it wanes, your ability to sustain what you are doing or take in what you are seeing and hearing seems to collapse at some point. A gaggle of thoughts come up and whisk you away. Perhaps your interest and commitment are still there, but try as you might, you cannot sufficiently engage. You have used up the energy you have available for paying attention. Despite your will to persist, your being has gone flat, making you, your will, ineffective. This is primarily a matter of the necessary energy running out. We need a break to let it replenish and then we can return with renewed attention.

Looking at a different manifestation of will, we can examine our ability to follow through on our intentions. In the morning, you get on the scale, and promise yourself that you will cut down on the after-dinner snacks. Then the evening rolls around to find you forgetting or ignoring that promise. Or you sit down in front of your computer with the intention of completing a necessary task. Thirty minutes later, with your allotted time running short, and having been drawn into some of the internet's many offerings, you have not even begun your originally intended task. In such cases, the quality of energy that your will needs to be able to follow through is lacking. The initial impulse of will, the original intention, does not take root at a high enough quality of energy to preclude it being preempted by other intentions and impulses arising later.

Higher energies can form a more stable and unified being, enabling greater unity of purpose in our will, greater responsiveness of our being to our will, and thus affecting what we actually do. Without that stable, unified being, we suffer a continuing parade of conflicting intentions. With sufficient being, our conflicting desires and impulses can be reintegrated to take their place in a unified will, a will that merits the name I.

If the automatic energy predominates, random, associative thoughts, reactive emotions, and changing physical impulses have more effective control over what we do. Our will is fragmented. The automatic energy does not offer a global or sustained view; it changes with every inner breeze and gives our will nothing to hold onto. The will that comes to the automatic energy splinters into what has been called the many I's of our personality. The result is a scattered way of living.

If the sensitive energy predominates, we know the meaning of our thoughts and we can think intentionally, we feel our feelings, and are in contact with our senses. All that brings more continuity and stability to our actions, though we are still far from integrated and whole.

If the conscious energy predominates, we are whole. Our body, emotions, and mind are conjoined under the single umbrella of balanced being. That unified being serves as a vehicle through which our will can be effective in its actions. We can be said to have a single and unique I.

In later installments of this inner work series, we will explore the impact of energies in more detail. For this week, notice how your state varies, how at times you are able to do and accomplish things that would not be possible at other times. The various qualities of energies, our being, holds to the key to understanding this situation and to improving it.

Follow @innerfrontier

About Inner Frontier Send us email